lasted understanding religious convincing history destruction

10 AMERICAN HOLOCAUST
sands of years. It is estimated, for instance, that it took more than 4000
years for the dissolving ice barrier to creep north from what now is Hartford,
Connecticut to St. Johnsbury, Vermont-a distance of less than 200
miles. With the partial melting of the great frozen glaciers, some of the
water they had imprisoned was unlocked, trickling into the ocean basins
and, over a great stretch of time, slowly lifting world-wide sea levels up
hundreds of feet. As the water rose it began ebbing over and eventually
inundating continental shelves once again, along with other relatively lowlying
lands throughout the globe, including most of Berengia.
The natives of Berengia, who probably never noticed any of these gross
geologic changes, so gradual were they on the scale of human time perception,
naturally followed the climate-dictated changing shape of the land.
Finally, at some point, Asia and North America became separate continents
again, as they had been many tens of thousands of years earlier.
Berengia was no more. And those of her inhabitants then living in the
segregated Western Hemisphere became North America's indigenous peoples,
isolated from the rest of the world by ocean waters on every side.
Apart from the possible exception of a chance encounter with an Asian or
Polynesian raft or canoe from time to time (possible in theory only, there
is as yet no good evidence that such encounters ever actually occurred),
the various native peoples of the Americas lived from those days forward,
for thousands upon thousands of years, separate from the human life that
was evolving and migrating about on the rest of the islands and continents
of the earth. 11
Much more controversial than the issue of where the first peoples of
the Americas came from and how they got to the Western Hemisphere are
the questions of when they originally moved from Berengia into North and
South America-and how many people were resident in the New World
when Columbus arrived in 1492. Both these subjects have been matters of
intense scholarly scrutiny during the past several decades, and during that
time both of them also have undergone revolutions in terms of scholarly
knowledge. Until the 1940s, for example, it commonly was believed that
the earliest human inhabitants of the Americas had migrated from the
Alaskan portion of Berengia down into North and then South America no
more than 6000 years ago. It is now recognized as beyond doubt, however,
that numerous complex human communities existed in South America
at least 13,000 years ago and in North America at least 6000 years
before that. These are absolute minimums. Very recent and compelling
archaeological evidence puts the date for earliest human habitation in Chile
at 32,000 B.C. or earlier and North American habitation at around 40,000
B.C., while some highly respected scholars contend that the actual first
date of human entry into the hemisphere may have been closer to 70,000
B.C.U
Similarly dramatic developments have characterized scholarly estimates